In the Wilderness of the World’s Being

An American poet is inadvertently drawn into a metaphysical quest for beauty, meeting along the way others strangely on the same quest—a disabled eccentric looking for a curator to catalog a collection of unknown Renaissance masterpieces, a disenchanted painter who rejects artistic pursuits to solve instead the ultimate problem of death, a wealthy Italian aristocrat seeking a literary assistant to help finish an incomplete memoir of a mysterious woman both seem to have known. Rarely does a writer come along that displays such stylistic exceptionalism, at the same time redefining literary authenticity with infinite depth and profundity. Sanfilip probes the meaning of art, culture and the ultimate value of beauty in exquisite prose that plays across a narrative landscape both inspired and masterful in its rendering. Written with the psychological depth of a Dostoyevsky and the emotional poignancy of a D.H. Lawrence, In the Wilderness of the World’s Being is a novel that revives the power and potential of fiction handled with mastery and skill by one of America’s most important writers on today’s literary landscape.